Table-Talk; or, Original Essays.These were essays in the "familiar style" of the sort that had begun with Montaigne two centuries earlier, and were greatly admired by Hazlitt.Here he brought his essay writing much closer to the model of the "fa Table-Talk; or, Original Essays.These were essays in the "familiar style" of the sort that had begun with Montaigne two centuries earlier, and were greatly admired by Hazlitt.Here he brought his essay writing much closer to the model of the "familiar essay" as distinct from the eighteenth-century periodical essay.In a preface to a later edition of the book, Hazlitt explained that rather than being scholarly and precise, these essays attempted to combine the "literary and the conversational". As in a conversation between friends, the discussion would often branch off into topics related only in a general way to the main theme, "but which often threw a curious and striking light upon it, or upon human life in general".Though the essays were structured in the loose manner of conversations held at a table, this was a time when Hazlitt frequently secluded himself in isolation at Winterslow. His motivation is explained in one of the Table-Talk essays, "On Living to One's-Self" (January 1821), as not wanting to withdraw completely but rather to become an invisible observer of society. Also here and elsewhere in the series he weaves personal material into more general reflections on life, frequently bringing in long recollections of happy days of his years as an apprentice painter (as in "On the Pleasure of Painting", written in December 1820) as well as other pleasurable recollections of earlier years, "hours ... sacred to silence and to musing, to be treasured up in the memory, and to feed the source of smiling thoughts thereafter" ("On Going a Journey", written January 1822). ...Continua Nascondi